


The Cutman

by LaFlamingo



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Afghanistan, Angst, BAMF Karen Page, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Gen, Mentions of Rape, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Punisher - Freeform, Slow Build, TBI, UST, all the feels, dumpster trash, eventually characters talk shit to each other, i want this pairing to work but i dont know how, in which micro makes an appearance, kastle - Freeform, lots of cursing and acronyms, rst?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-08-07 08:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7708138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaFlamingo/pseuds/LaFlamingo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"...the cutman slips in, and pulls the fighter's head back to treat any wounds. It has to be done quickly, and well, so all the blood is stopped. This is crucial in any fight: a good cutman can mean the difference between winning and losing." </i><br/> <br/>(Or: in which time passes and their paths cross when they shouldn't. )</p><p>"Christ, I'm like your cutman now," Karen mutters, aggravated as she applies the butterfly suture.</p><p>"Wouldn't it be a cutgirl?" Frank replies, groggy from blood loss but still apparently retaining a sense of humor. </p><p>"Shut up, smartass."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title and quote taken from the excellent podcast series called 'The Story.' This episode was titled "The Cutgirl," but The Story has a hoard of amazing podcasts. Jump on that shit, yo. 
> 
> Also: trigger warnings for mentions of sex trafficking of children and rape.

In March, Karen spends a drunk night rereading a manila folder she swore she’d never open again, crying and alternatively screaming and punching one of her pillows. She wakes up with the most fuzzy, rank cottonmouth she can remember since two years ago at Josie’s.

But on the precipice of this hangover, this brutal, throbbing monster that came at the hands of some shitty $5 pinot-noir Karen bought with high hopes she might cook with but never did, she makes a choice.

Karen calls a man about a place called Kandahar.

 

This starts with exhaustion, and the mind-numbing blur of insomnia: with days that normally ran to ten hours now bleeding into twelve, fourteen hours as she attempts to juggle her stories for The Bulletin, with stories Ellison wants her to leave alone.

And Ellison picks up on it, sorta, in that bared-teeth sarcasm of his, even as he heaps praise upon her in the only backhanded way a jaded reporter can: by sticking post-its to the extra-large coffees he sneaks into her office in response to her stories

"DEA pissed, good job," one reads.

Another, when she comes to work with a black eye that she insists she received at a boxing class: "You know you have insurance, right?"

And then, after Karen may or may not spend three days awake and working at the office: "Insurance benefits incl. Ambien. Caffeine addiction doesn't have rehab option, sry."

The last one she brings to his office, knocking angrily on the door and narrowing her eyes when he motions her in.

"Really?" She points to the scrawl.

Ellison is unimpressed. "Go home, Karen."

 

 

Karen does her homework in the only disturbingly thorough and obsessive way she knows how: she first talks to academics about Kandahar, visits Middle East and geo-political professors at NYU, talks to lingual and cultural specialists at Yale – one guy specifically who had a background in Pashtu, whose family left in the initial onslaught in 2002.

Academics tell a story of the inexorable drag of time, the headache-inducing complexity of Afghanistan and how there’s a damn good reason it was called the ‘Graveyard of Empires.’ Kandahar, specifically: the nexus of Pasthu calture that resisted the Soviets tooth and nail, where the vacuum state that existed after the fall of the Najibullah government was a reason the Taliban first found a foothold there. One man tells her how the incessant violence and sexual assault by the mujahedeen was what capitulated Kandahar hearts and minds to the Taliban, who promised stability and safety but spoke little of the sacrifices that would entail.

And then when the Americans came: the Haqqani Network, out of Pakistan, the underhanded dealings of ISI funding the Taliban. How Kandahar experienced a massive surge in NATO and US troops in 2010 to attempt to push the Taliban from its stronghold. Civilian casualties. Coalition injuries. Bombs and drugs and everything inbetween.

In short, what academia gives Karen about Kandahar is a goddamn headache, and for two weeks after she finally compiles all of her info, her interviews, her notes and scrawl, she sits at Ben’s desk at The Bulletin and doesn’t realize she’s been rubbing at her temples for over half an hour until Ellison walks by and glances in.

“You’re developing a pretty interesting tic,” he tells her, then quickly evacuates her presence before she can yell something scathing at him.

 

The grunt side of the coin is a little more painful and intimate. A little messier. How many deployments is that? Who deployed? With which unit? When? Frank is a dead man, and even though in court they were able to vouch for his being in the Marines through now-dead Schoonover, the files otherwise have vanished into the ether. No, he was not a decorated Marine. No, he did not save his unit in a canyon up in the Waziristan. He did not exist, period. Please stop calling this office for information.

So going directly at it by mentioning the foreboding, three-syllable name of a supposed mass serial-killer doesn’t work well. But Karen narrows down the crushing amount of years and combat and blood to a stretch between 2010 and 2012, not admitting that those years came from her nervous foray into the Punisher’s house, when it was still Frank Castle’s house and still standing. From dates she saw scribbled in the corner of platoon photos, trying not to trip on the errant kid toy here and there on the carpet.

2010 – 2012. Karen takes a deep breath, grabs an armful of folders and dives in.

 

 

Kandahar is a place in Afghanistan where one could come to the startling conclusion that dirt had a variety of odiferous smells, where the opium poppies would bleed black tar and where haggard, bumpy mud roads hemorrhaged blown-off limbs and brain trauma.

“Fucking massive,” is what James Hedges tells her about the IEDs he encountered, a retired embedded journalist with the _New York Times._ He cradles a whisky but he’s looking out a spot past her shoulder, watching the traffic outside the window. “The sound was – was like an angry god. It was a physical force that would bodyslam you like some WWE shit.”

She’s here about his time embedded with the 2/7 Marines, but it turns out there’s much more where that came from and here they are.

“How often did this happen?” she asks quietly.

His eyes get distant and he fixates on the horizon.

“It felt like every goddamn day,” he says, and then, with a snort that makes it obvious he’s trying to relieve the tension in the conversation as he brings his gaze back to her: “My tinnitus amongst the staff at the paper is _legendary_.”

 

And that’s the tricky thing, here, continually skirting glances at the lips of buildings and hoping to see black, and dreading to see red. Continually creating a mantra of, _He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead_ ; to feel okay about burrowing into a place that all others seem to want to forget, to bury.

One man talks about his unit’s encounter with bacha bazi, nine year old boys dressed up as girls and dancing for men who were going to rape them. Or how other little kids were sold off to pay debts, trafficked to Pakistan (because that is where all bad things are born, the SPECTRE headquarters if this was a James Bond novel) when their parents couldn’t make enough money on crops not poppy related.

The others, ultimately, tell her Kandahar exists in uncomfortable contradictions:

It is 20,000 square mile wallow of misery.

It is fruit orchards and blossoms, bright and vivid against the stale brown of dust.

It is 450,000 people who are a large group of expletives that Karen does not necessarily write down, even when Corporal (former) Juan Browning taps angrily at the table and insists that she does.

It is a place where the food was actually pretty damn good, but you always had to be aware the next day you might have the shits the whole night through. 

And then Karen finally finds it, finds the blip:

In 2012, Kandahar was where all of them died.

 

 

 

((Well. Not all of them.  
But too many of them. ))

 

 

 

Sergeant Paul Gutierrez only relaxes after the third beer, and even then, his shoulders scream cagey. He is proud of his shaggy (as he dubs it) ‘caveman beard,’ and tells her a lot of guys luxuriate in the facial hair they weren’t allowed to grow during their time ‘in.’

He does not have a trigger finger tic like Frank did(does), but Karen has found that not many of the people she’s interviewed exhibit that same kind of clench jawed, black-eyed rage of the Punisher.

Instead, Gutierrez insistently jumps his knee beneath the table, Karen only knows this because occasionally, he rests his foot on the leg of the table, sending the vibrations all the way through her notepad and the recorder resting next to her glass of water.

“How much do you know, I guess, is the real question.” He finally says. They’d spent the better part of an hour bullshitting and talking work, talking New York, because Gutierrez took the booth closest to the back exit, because he found a corner where he had three walls of protection, and because, even at a height greater than six something and a build like a brick wall, Gutierrez seemed uneasy.

“I understand that Kandahar is a shithole,” Karen says, deadpan, and Gutierrez gives a bark of laughter.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that would be some of it.”

“I also understand that your unit suffered a casualty count that it hadn’t seen even in Iraq, since Vietnam.” She says this quieter, and Gutierrez’ gaze immediately goes hollow.

“Yeah,” he says, after a long moment. “Yeah, that would be some of it, too.”

Karen swallows, leans forward, “So…so what’s the rest?”

 

 

“You ever heard of a guy called Schoonover?” He asks.

 

 

 

 

Three days later, there’s white plastic clinging to her blouse that she belatedly realizes is a skull fragment and Gutierrez is splattered and crumpled on the linoleum floor of his apartment's kitchen out in New Jersey.

Karen’s heart is attempting to pummel its way out of her chest and she’s scrabbling backwards on her ass to try to reach her purse when she hears the belated, muted bark of what must be a suppressed weapon, and _oh jesus fuck_ ; she had not been taking this as seriously as she should have and her hands shake as she tries to reach for the handle of the gun and –

An audible sigh comes from around the corner. Karen’s pulling out the .38 as best as adrenaline can help her, backed up against a kitchen cabinet and arms locked but feeling a trembling start in her legs as she hears heavy footsteps round the doorway.

Black cap, beard, dark eyes but the raccoon-mask of bruises is suspiciously absent, even with a bleeding nose and red smears on his face and neck.

Frank Castle sees the .38 and the blond hair splattered with blood and lowers his pistol.

There is a meaningful pause.

“Goddammit,” he rasps, then: “Goddammit, you are nearly worse than fuckin’ Red.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes about content**  
>  1: Bacha-bazi is real and it is horrifying. If you want some more depression in your life, [Frontline](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/) has a very disturbing documentary about the whole ordeal. 
> 
> 2: I do not want to portray that I myself hold racist beliefs about a country I've never been to. But it bears mentioning that war tends to make people pretty damn racist because they see people behave at the worst. Having known friends who have been combat-deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, this seemed to be a recurring theme. Not a view I hold, but one I've observed manifest just because war can bring out the shittiest in people.
> 
> 3: If I fucked up any of my paraphrasing on Kandahar, someone let me know. I researched, but I am still a flawed, sad human being. 
> 
> **Other Notes/Stuff:**  
>  I do intend this to be a multi-chapter thing, but I am nervous about its existence in the first place; I've done a lot of obsessive reading of _Punisher_ comics the last few weeks and rewatched some episodes from this season and...and it's hard. The Kastle pairing is hard, particularly when compounded with the raw grief and anguish that Frank Castle suffers after losing his family. There is undeniably chemistry between those two characters, but I do not think it is right to throw them at each other for sexytiems without taking a step back to really look at the character of Frank Castle and how it would have to work (if it worked at all). In short: I enjoy being in the dumpster with the rest of you filthy people, but it's a rough place. 
> 
> This being said, I did my best to do research about all the things listed here, including OEF and OIF, soldier experiences in Iraq/Afghanistan and even looked at the logistics of actually _living_ and surviving in NYC. Fun fact: minimum rent is $3200 in Hell's Kitchen. If Karen is a fledgling journalist, she probably is making $40k a year and will likely starve to death living there. 
> 
> Anyway: please let me know criticisms or concerns. I really do want to make this work better as it progresses. I'd also love if you guys would be up for recommending a beta place or kastle communities. 
> 
> Thanks!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That is the second time you have pulled a gun on me,” is what Frank finally says after the pregnant, labored silence that wallows between the two of them at this browbeaten diner on the outskirts of Newark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be forewarned: dialogue heavy. These people need to talk because they are grown-ups...not necessarily because they want to.

“That is the second time you have pulled a gun on me,” is what Frank finally says after the pregnant, labored silence that wallows between the two of them at this browbeaten diner on the outskirts of Newark. 

 Karen ignores him for another moment just to see if it will make him squirm, and tries to take another sip from this coal-black, spasm-inducing shit that supposed to be coffee without flinching.

 She’s successful on not flinching, but Frank stares levelly at her from across the table, unmoved.

“It definitely appears that way,” she responds, reaching over the table to grab two packets of sugar and stir them in. His eyes flicker down to watch her hands, the disapproval clear.

 “This coffee tastes like death, and don’t you try to convince me otherwise,” she says at the look.

 “You think sugar will somehow fix that?”

She leans back, tossing the empty packs onto the table to cross her arms over her chest. “No, Frank, but it’ll at least keep me from picking this up,” she reaches out for a second and jiggles the handle on the coffee mug, “and throwing it at you.”

 He thinks about it, pulls his gaze from her to flicker his eyes back and forth on the sluggish semi-traffic groaning and wheezing outside. Gives a grunt of acknowledgement. “Fair enough.”

Karen takes that small moment to watch him. Sees that his hair grown out, not shaggy like some of the veterans she's met, but not a high and tight.  Sees that trigger finger tap-tapping on the side of his mug, his shoulders surprisingly straightened, thrown back more than the last time they found themselves in a diner. Not trying to appear smaller, no – he may have buttoned up his coat to keep that flak and skull design hidden, but he doesn’t appear to be hiding any more. Except –

“What’s with the beard?” she asks.   

  “Hmm?” Frank brings his gaze back to her, blinks. When he finally processes her words. “Oh, yeah, well…” he rubs a hand along his jaw. “It’s a good disguise.”

Karen draws her gaze pointedly to his chest, and when he catches the glare and glances down at the skull buried beneath the coat, he shrugs.

 “No bullshit,” he says. “I’m sick of getting shot at by cops, and this allows me to do work in the daytime.”

 “So you’re still working?” she asks, ignoring the writhing feeling that starts in her stomach.

He looks back at her and briefly clenches his jaw. “Yeah, yeah I am.” When she doesn’t respond immediately, he takes a sip of his coffee, grimacing when he puts it down. “What about you?”

Karen swallows but tries to feign nonchalance. “I don’t know what you –“

“No bullshit,” he repeats. “Either this is some weird, blind crusade you’re still doing with those numnuts attorneys or –”

 “The firm collapsed,” Karen cuts him off. “The firm died after your case and we all went our separate ways.”

 He gives a short exclamation that could have been construed as laughter but sounds more hollow. “And you’re blaming me for that?”

  _Not exactly_ , she thinks, because that wouldn’t be fair. it was a three pronged attack, one part due to the ‘insanity of Frank Castle’ and another two parts Matt Murdock and even Karen Page: Matt with  his stupid martyrdom and mission and Karen with her own campaign for truth, justice and the American way. Foggy was the only man treading water at that point, and even then, the other two heads of the triumvirate only served as cement blocks on his feet.

So, no. It wasn’t exactly and in totality Frank’s fault.

  “No,” she says simply.

 He gives her a look across the table that says _cut your shit_ , even as he reaches for his cup and brings it to his lips, but Karen is not intimidated and feels a flush of anger crawling up her neck.

“Why are we even having this conversation?” she demands, leaning forward and uncrossing her arms to rest them on the table. “Why do you even care what I’m doing or where I’m –”

 In the hushed silence of the diner, Frank puts the cup back down with a resounding _thud_. It’s almost midnight and traffic is slow, but the sound echoes solidly through the restaurant. Karen manages to not jump, but she can see the flash of anger that burns in the look he gives her, and grudgingly bites down on her next sentence.

The heat of that anger simmers, and abruptly dies. Franks suddenly looks resigned, shoulders sagging.

  “No lies, alright?”

Karen exhales audibly and glares.

She can see the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows, bites on the inside of his cheek. If she feels a strange fixation of staring at his throat, she ignores and smothers it.  

 “I had no intentions of runnin’ into you again,” he says slowly, and Karen tries not to feel an ache in her chest suddenly bloom outwards. “This isn’t me trying to be a knight in shining armor or any of that shit.”

“Then what is it?” she feels a stiffness in her bones, then.

 He lets out of a huff of what could be laughter and shakes his head. “This is goddamn luck,” he replies.

She raises an eyebrow and tries not to clench her jaw. “Luck?”

He keeps her gaze for a long moment before leaning back and feigning finding a spot on his lap, wiping it off. “Luck,” he murmurs, “or you looking into something that you shouldn’t.” And then he looks up and that anger is there again, clear in the tick at the side of his jaw and the fact his brow is beginning to furrow.

Karen wills herself to keep her face blank, even as her heart begins to pound.

Frank continues, “Now, the last time I checked, it looked like you were into some kinda – ” he swipes at his nose for a quick second, “some kinda writing gig with a paper in town, but considering that I’m dead and that Schoonover is dead, I don’t see a particular reason why either of us would be crossing paths for a story.”

When Karen remains silent, he slowly brings his forearms to rest on the table and then leans forward again, close.

“So what is it, Ms. Page?” Frank asks, voice dangerously calm. “Is there a story here that I should know about, or are you chasing ghosts you damn well should be leaving dead?”

He has changed, she thinks, distantly, even as the throb of her heart is ratcheting up through her head. That coiled rage is still there, still lurking, but he has become outwardly composed: they are having this conversation, this discussion of what she knows could be construed as a _violation of trust_ and his voice remains composed and unruffled, even as she can see out of the corner of her eye his trigger finger tapping anxiously on the side of his mug and his gaze nothing but fire.

“You were dead,” she finally says, quiet. “I didn’t see why it mattered what kind of stories I pursued from that point forward.”

“Maybe,” he says, eyes unblinking on her, “Except that ‘Kandahar’ is a buzzword and you’ve started walking down a path that’s damn near impossible to back out of.”

“With you dead _or_ alive,” she says, and she feels the tremor starting in her voice but tries to banish it, “there was still a story there, a story that was continuing, and I needed to _know_.”

“Needed to know _what?”_ he bites off each word like they’re something sharp and painful.

“What happened in Kandahar.”

“ _Why?”_ he growls. “Why does it matter?”

She looks away for a moment, blinks away tears. Turns back to see him still watching her rigidly.

 “Because you weren’t the only one, Frank.”

“The only what?”

And then she laughs. Can’t help it. A quick bark of something that is more pain than laughter. “There were more than one Blacksmith,” she says. “There _are_ more than one Blacksmith.”

 He leans back then, breath puffing out audibly as he throws his shoulders into the raggedy red vinyl upholstery behind him and momentarily lifts his baseball cap, running a hand through his hair and looking out the window.

Karen slows her breathing, takes a moment to drink a glass of water, cupping the glass with both hands and letting the cold bleed into her.

He clears his throat, and tentatively, she looks back towards him.

“You don’t think I didn’t know that?” he asks her, and she expects the question to be said with anger but instead she sees now that he looks pained.

It feels like a blow, but Karen sets her shoulders back and releases her grip on her glass. Gives herself a moment to feel the heat of near-crying retreat and to process the whiplash of this conversation.

She inhales slowly again. “Did you come to kill my source?” she finally asks.

He shakes his head violently. “ _No.”_

She finds another huff of skeptical laughter in her throat. “Then why,” she says, and motions around them, “Is this happening?”

He glances at her for a long second before drawing a hand, knuckles scabbed and yellow, to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“I have been cleaning out house,” he announces, then makes eye contact with Karen.

“And my source was rotten?”

He shakes his head again, more slowly this time. “No, no he wasn’t.”

“Then why –”

“We Marines are held to a code,” Frank says, drawing his hand away from his face and resting it on the side of the mug. “A code of conduct and honor that we hold in equal regard to the Constitution and sometimes the Holy Bible.”

Karen narrows her eyes, tilts her head slightly to the side.“But you killed Schoonover for what he did.”

“Sure,” Frank replies, “but he couldn’t have been the only one. I –” and he looks away for a moment, eyes distant, “I recognized some of those voices at the docks, okay? And sure, those motherfuckers roasted like they should’ve, but I knew, _I knew_ they couldn’t have been the only ones involved.”

“Why not?”

When he looks back, he doesn’t hide his annoyance. “Well, one, because you’re here, which means you found something, and for two –”

“It’s close-knit,” Karen murmurs.

Frank blinks, but it’s enough to see his surprise. “What do you mean–”

She snorts. “Frank, I’ve been drudging my way through this for the last two months. I get it. Combat theaters can be freakishly close-knit places, and word gets around. Hell, I –” and she stops a moment at the intensity of the look he’s giving her, but continues, “I talked to people from motor-T and infantry to fucking communications, and somewhere in there – especially in the infantry guys – there was this recurring narrative that came about.”

His curiosity is reined, but showing, in the nearly imperceptible roll of his shoulders forward. Towards her. “A narrative about what?”

“Money showing up in weird places and men dying in ways they shouldn’t have. Is that a story you know?”

In an instant, he shutters, leans back slightly and shrugs. “In some part, but –”

“But what?”

Frank is silent for a moment, before knitting his fingers together and carefully setting them on the table.

 “My purpose,” he says quietly, “is to punish people. Do you understand what that means?”

  She thinks, _red, purple,_ that iron scent like old chain swingsets (blood) and that ugly, pungent smell of a body that recently voided itself. She thinks of glossy crime scene photos and the muffled _crunch_ of bones breaking while she crouched under a stainless steel counter and tried to will herself not to make a fucking sound.

 She thinks she understands. But when they lock eyes across the table, she sees that he does not believe it is enough.

  “I am not here, like you are, Karen,” and inwardly something skips at the use of her name, how it sounds too intimate for this conversation and that rawness that’s still scraping in her chest, “to uncover the truth and show it to others. I am here to kill those who have wronged.”

She swallows, gives herself a moment again to push down at what’s rising in her throat.

“So, you don’t care what I have found.”

 “Not necessarily,” he says, “but their endgame might not be what you want from this.”

 She wills herself to stare back at him without flinching. “And my source?”

  Frank looks down, the tic in his jaw jumping. “He was a target. Not mine, but others.”

 “He wasn’t in your unit though,” Karen says.

“No, but – like you said – it’s a close-knit party. Word travels, and he knew something.”

 They sit in silence long enough that a beleaguered waitress, roots showing against her brittle yellow hair and walk stiff, shuffles out to them and refills their mugs. Frank thanks her quietly.

Karen stares out the window, sees the twinkle of lights signaling Brooklyn just a stone’s throw away. She brings her hand to her mouth, keeps it there for a minute.

_He is dead_ , she tries to reinforce, to emphasize. _He is dead and this other person is not him, is the monster, the beast._

But then she remembers how this hellscape has played out in the span of less than a day, how no more than three hours ago he was telling her, quietly, to call 9-11 for the remains of the man on the floor of the kitchen, how something anguished seem to flicker in him when he looked from the body to her, saw that her legs were trembling but her hands were steady when she reached for her phone, and dialed.

 She chose to pursue Kandahar.

 And there are consequences that come with that.

 “Alright,” Karen finally says, breaking the silence. Frank looks towards her and blinks. “So what do we do now?”

He tilts his head to the side and regards her. “You’re not going to back down from this, are you.” It is not a question but a resigned statement.

  “No,” she says, firm.

 “And I can’t convince you otherwise.” He says, another statement.

 “No,” she repeats.

 He grunts, nodding to himself for a second.

  “I’ll follow you home,” he finally says. “We’ll convoy to wherever you live now and I’ll make sure both our asses are covered.”

  “And then?”

Frank chews the inside of his cheek for a second, reaching into his pocket to toss a twenty onto the table.

He returns those black eyes to hers. “Then we’ll be in touch.”

                       

           

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is transitional. I know it's not exciting or smutty, but perhaps good things come to those who wait. 
> 
> I've been deriving a lot of what I believe Frank's mindset to be at this point from _Punisher: Year One_ from Dave Abnett. It is some of the most heartbreaking shit I've read, but it put me into the belief that Frank Castle is attempting to redefine his purpose and his mission after supposedly finding the snake and cutting off its head with Schoonover. I think finding that purpose is gonna take more time than he's expecting. 
> 
> I highly recommend for those interested in developing your _Punisher_ chops further than _Daredevil_ to check out this awesome post from [Queensofthekastle](http://queensofthekastle.tumblr.com/post/142325022618/the-kastle-shipper-turned-frank-trash-how-do-i) on tumblr. They do not know I exist, but the comic recs were excellent in helping me figure out these characters more thoroughly. 
> 
> Let me know if the dialogue seemed in character. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You know, you ask _me_ ,” and she prods a finger into her chest before pointing back at him, “to meet _you_ nearly out of the goddamn state at a stupid McDonalds and I do so. You ask _me_ to be as discreet as possible and low-key in getting out here and I do. You ask me to listen to your story and now I am, and I am asking questions and looking at people and places and now you want me to fuck off?” Karen snorts. “No. I am here, and you are here, and if people haven’t listened in the past, I am sorry, but I am here now, and I want to _know._ So _tell me_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for discussion of child sex trafficking.

Gutierrez’s funeral hurts. In more ways than one. Even though she manages to watch without being noticed, manages to leave without crying after the flag folding and the three-shot volley, it aches.

It does not hurt like Ben’s funeral. But it hurts in a haunting, ugly way that keeps her up, rereading transcripts and her notes from Gutierrez and crawling into Wikileaks to try to puzzle through military jargon with acronyms that stretch out far longer than acronyms are supposed to.  Eyes burning, sore and feeling bruised from staring at computer screens for hours on end.

It’s only when she wakes up, head-down on her desk, neck on fire and forehead indented with the pen she fell asleep on, that Karen realizes she’d nearly been awake for three days straight.

Ellison pretty much takes one look at her when she staggers in at 11:00 and raises his eyebrows.

“Page,” he begins, as she leans on the doorframe and regards him blearily.

“Yes?”

“I only have two questions.”

She brings her hand up to rub absentmindedly at her face. Bites down on the yawn that wants to crawl out. “Okay, shoot.”

“One,” and he raises one, crimson-stained finger (they all use computers, of course, but Ellison also carries around a red-pen to commit savagery on papers), “is your story in about the protest on 45th?”

Karen nods.

“Okay, two: what day is it?”

She doesn’t even realize she’s yawning the answer until Ellison stops her midsentence.  
  
“I’ve heard enough,” he says. “Your story is in. In this current state, unless I shoot you full of amphetamines, you are worthless to me. Go home.”

 

 

 

A bed sounds nice, but the couch is much closer in proximity, and Karen collapses into the closest thing she's experienced to a coma on it.

 

 

This does not unravel neatly, but it does start to unravel. After Gutierrez’s death, a few contacts abruptly disappear, and go silent. Another few seem anxious, wary to continue any other conversations with Karen about _Kandahar,_ about _Helmand_ and other places on a map that her tongue butchers when she tries to pronounce.

Karen’s sleep schedule is fucked, and though she’d like to pretend it doesn’t affect her, it all does: she starts to flinch again at the sound of anything breaking in the distance, is careful to let her own plates not crack together when she’s doing dishes. Dreams in red and white, sometimes wakes up and sees brain matter on her walls, has to blink to see the grimy yellow wallpaper there instead.

And she’s known this since her last foray into a diner with Frank fucking Castle, but it is the _smells_ that spook her the most, drag her back: the iron she can smell walking by old chainlink fences; the whiff of meat at the supermarket. There aren’t a lot of place that give off the sulphuric stink of cordite, no, but for everything else, the smells are an immediate trip back to nightmares, her stomach clenching and her palms automatically sweating. 

Foggy mentions it the next time they go out for pizza, his treat, because he’s a big shot lawyer now and a fancy-ass suit and even has a _haircut_ that Karen never even imagined seeing on him.

“So,” he says, reaching over the table to grab at their second bottle of wine (half off wine on Thursdays, Foggy claimed it’d be a crime against humanity to not pillage the place for all it was worth) and pour his glass to the top, “insomnia. Is that a new look the kids are all going for these days, or...?”

Karen smirks, eyeballing Foggy’s overfull glass of wine. “I don’t know,” she responds, adopting a drawl. “Is stealing all the wine sumthin’ they’ve been teachin’ ya at yer fancy law firm?”

He huffs, scrunches his eyebrows at her over the rim of his glass mid-drink. “Stealing implies that this is the only bottle of wine,” he says as he puts the glass down. “Our supply may as well be infinite because I, Foggy Nelson, hotshot attorney, am footing the bill, and as such, do not see this as theft.”

“Proper wine etiquette does not include filling a wine glass to the rim, Foggy.”

“Mmm,” he says. “It also doesn’t include guests dissing their host’s wine etiquette, so go figure.”

And Karen laughs, feeling happily bloated and full on food in the first time in what feels like months, her wine buzz edging into comfortable drunkenness.

Foggy smiles, pleased with her response, and for a moment they drink in comfortable silence. Karen feels more than she sees when Foggy starts to stiffen up.

"Karen,” he finally says. She idly turns her head back to him from watching out the front window. “How are you doing?”

“Well,” she says slowly. “At this moment in time, I’m pretty drunk and pretty full on pizza.”

“That much is obvious,” Foggy agrees. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Karen grunts, grips the sides of the chair and slowly inching her way up from a slouch. “How about,” she straightens, gaze fixed and irritated on Foggy, “You tell me how it _looks_ like I’m doing.”

And he bridles at this, annoyance evident in the raising of his eyebrows and the palms suddenly faceup on the table, exasperated. “Karen, c’mon –”

“Did we come out to have a good time, or are you attempting an intervention?”

Foggy shakes his head at her, disbelieving. “We came out to have a good time, because I haven’t seen you in _months_ ,” and Karen feels her lips pull in a frown at this, because it’s not a _lie, “_ and Matt vanished off the grid back in February and, among all else – you are my _friend_ and I enjoy your company.” When he sees her stance soften slightly, he adds, “Even if you made the totally poor choice to move to a safer, less expensive neighborhood where you don’t have to worry about shoot-ups and dead people on your doorstep every week.”

Karen lets out a huff of laughter, looks down at the table and shakes her head. “That’s the dealbreaker, huh?”

“Just about. That and trying to help you move your crappy furniture with my still tender shoulder.”

She snorts in reply. “There wasn’t _that_ much to move.”

“Hey, it’s still more than ten boxes and it’s still up more than a flight of stairs. I have to have boundaries, you know.”

Karen gives another huff, crosses her arms over her chest and stares at the table. In the space of silence that Foggy gives her, she finally relents, and looks up.

“I’m sorry, Foggy. I’m just –” and she can feel the heat of crying push up her throat and it’s annoying, and aggravating, and she wants to blame a majority of it on the booze, “—I’m just really goddamn tired.”

Foggy simply nods, a hound dog expression of worry in his eyes. “You look it.”

“I know,” she replies ruefully.

“Is this –” and he looks down at his hands, searching for words, “Is this the new norm? I remember you seeming a bit skittish in February but –”

February might as well be a four-letter word for Karen. While it wasn’t the watershed moment of a months-long buildup of anxiety, anger and paranoia (that would be March), it certainly represented an overflow, manifesting in Foggy seeing her violently startle, then bolt out of the restaurant there were in when a waitress had accidentally dropped a tray, sending plates shattering and skittering onto the ground.

But she shakes her head. Because, no, this isn’t February. Or March. This is May, and a new purpose, albeit one that is proving as ugly, frustrating and elusive as nothing else in Karen’s life. Also, one that may or may not continue to involve Frank Castle, a name still guaranteed to send Foggy into uncomfortable, contorted facial expressions.

“I’m working on a story,” she finally admits, keeping it vague.

“You’re always working on a story,” Foggy responds, a hint of pride in his voice.

And Karen rests an elbow on the table, brings her hand to her mouth for a moment before moving it to rest her chin upon. “Yeah,” she agrees, “but – but this one is just…it’s just _dense_. And frustrating.”

“Frustrating how?”

She inhales audibly. “My sources keep disappearing. Whether they’re afraid or they just decide it’s not worth it, I don’t know, but after – after a funeral,” and Foggy abruptly stiffens across the table, alert, “I went to a few weeks ago, they’ve started to dry up.”

“A funeral for whom?” Foggy asks slowly.

“A source,” Karen responds simply. At his look of exasperation, “No, Foggy, we’re not going to get into this and I don’t want you to get all shining knight on me like Matt. It was a funeral for a source. Nothing more.”

Foggy rubs his hands across his face like he wants to say something, then sighs loudly. “Okay,” he says. “Fine. So, you go to a funeral and then nobody wants to talk to you.” He looks away for a second, eyes narrowed. “I mean – how aggressive have you been about this?”

Karen’s eyebrows quirk in confusion. “What do you mean?”

The look Foggy gives her is a wry one. “With all due respect, former legal assistant for Nelson & Murdock, now the Terror of _The Bulletin_ ,” he says, “when you latch onto something, you are a goddamn pitbull.”

“Is this an insult, or a compliment?”

“Possibly both,” he says gently. “But what I’m trying to tell you is…” and he pauses, searching for words, “maybe you might want to hide your hand a little better.”

A wine buzz coupled with previous experience on _truth_ and _lies_ has made Karen defensive, and her lips thin. Across the table, Foggy notices the look and raises his hands in the ‘don’t shoot’ position. “I’m not saying you need to _lie_ , Karen.”

“Then what?”

And he looks away, lips pursed. “I’m just saying you may need to think about applying some strategy to this. For one,” and he looks back at her, a small smirk on his lips, “You are not the best of liars.”

Karen grunts in response.

Foggy continues. “Secondly, sometimes it pays to just…play it subtle.”

She tilts her head to the side, wordlessly questioning, and Foggy elaborates.  “If there’s one thing you should have learned from working at our illustrious firm, Karen,” and his gaze abruptly becomes serious, “it’s that you never know who’s watching.”

She does not think about a warehouse and a handgun and how it bucked in her hand.  How the web of her thumb was too close to the slide and caught on the first shot, before she remembered to _choke down on the grip_. She does not think about getting home and seeing the blood on her hands and smelling the gunpowder and wanting to –  and then succeeding – at retching and vomiting into her bathroom toilet.

She does not think about Colonel Schoonover and the flat, unmovable resolve in his eyes as he told her they were going for a drive, or the long, messy smear of his body as he was dragged from Ben’s old Buick.

“You’re right,” she finally says, reaching up and running a hand through her hair with a short laugh. “I just – you’re right.”

Foggy snorts. “Aren’t I always, though?”

 

 

 

It is not done with full willingness, because Karen is a prideful woman and somewhere in the Page DNA is a strong stubbornness trait, but she scales back. She compromises on ten hour days, max, starts aggressively pursuing the boxing membership she went all in on in January (maybe it was a dumb new year’s resolution, but contracts don’t give a _shit_ about how her mind might have changed) and installs a new deadbolt on her flimsy ass door in an apartment out at Flushing Meadows

If she is in on this – and she is, more than she wants to admit and more than she will ever vocalize – she has to play the game. Or, as one interviewee told her only half joking, “Dance like the monkey you are.”

So Karen plays the game. She slows down on her sources, starts to meet them outside NYC proper, in darker bars or nondescript playgrounds in towns no one remembers. In phone conversations, she Keeps it vague and keeps it light. Her stories to Ellison arrive on time and neat, and she installs a VPN on her computer to keep some unwanted eyes out.

It starts to work, and by June a source tentatively pokes its head out.

 

 

Matt Scofield, 26, meets her in a McDonalds outside Pohatcong. He’s not nervous like Gutierrez – not necessarily -- but after ordering the biggest meal on the menu and offering to split fries with Karen, nearly an hour into the conversation the food remains untouched and cold.

His fingers knit together tightly when he tells her about the IED at FOB Ramero, how it went off inside the wire and that just doesn’t happen – _shouldn’t_ happen.

“We do patrols all day and at night we guard ourselves,” he says. “Like, IEDs just don’t magically appear inside the fucking wire. _Period.”_

“Did you have to share any of the FOB with ANP?” she asks, referring to the Afghan National Police.

His eyes darken. “Yeah, yeah we did.”

“And?”

He blinks, finally looks down and grabs at a fry, face blank while he eats it. Karen waits out his silence, recognizing that he may be processing why she’s here, in random-ass Pohatcong to meet with a guy who was dishonorably discharged from his unit after seven years of exemplary service. Why she’s suddenly taking interest with a story that is – first and foremost – prefaced with _dishonorable discharge_ , which tends to condemn a service member to little discussion or leeway about their side of the story.

It’s easy to be suspicious. The circumstances of his dismissal – and the fact very few others from his unit are talking – could be a dead ringer for Scofield’s own guilt. But she isn’t so sure.

“You know they’re a bunch of shitheads, right?” is what he says to break the silence.

Karen raises her eyebrows, and Scofield sighs, gestures vaguely around them. “The --- the fucking ANP.”

She doesn’t shrug, but she tilts her head to the side, evaluating. “I’ve heard mixed reviews on working with ANP.”

Scofield gives a snort of contempt and shakes his head. “What, like this is something you can find on Yelp? Fuck off.”

Karen doesn’t flinch. “Some guys were more invested in the progress of the ANP than others.”

The look Scofield gives her is flat, and angry. “Yeah, and others fuckin’ smoked all the hashish they could get their goddamn hands on before showing up to work, eyes all red and shit.”

He glances around them, leans forward across the plastic table. “Stepping off the wire with these guys, and I was just scared shitless that I had a bunch of armed, belligerent and doped up toddlers under my command who were gonna shoot me in the back as soon as shit hit the fan.”

Scofield’s voice still is low but the tension becomes evident as he picks up speed, rambling.

“Or these other guys, who would magically lose this brand new, stupid-expensive gear we issued them within _days_ , and we’d have to sit here and pretend that it was normal, that we didn’t know where the gear was going or who it was going to eventually end up with, even when I found a pair of NVG’s on the body of an hajji –”

“NVG?” Karen interrupts softly.

He swipes at his nose again. “Night vision goggles,” he says, a temporary break in his anger. “They’re worth thousands of bucks and they’re invaluable on night raids. To ‘lose’ a pair of those?” and he makes quotation marks around the ‘lose,’ “Yeah, that’s fucking bullshit. Some of these sons of bitches were just – were just…” and he looks away, abruptly quiet.

Karen takes stock of Matt Scofield, then: forty pounds over what he’d like to be (his words, not hers), hair disheveled, though he wore a collared shirt to this meeting at a McDonalds. His shoulders are curled in and – when she glances down at the table – his fists are tightly clenched on the surface, odd scars webbing out from the spiral of clenched fingers on his left hand. She considers opening her mouth to prompt him further when he speaks suddenly.

“Sometimes you could hear them screaming,” his voice shakes.

Karen keeps very still, ignores the pit that drops in her stomach. “Hear who?”

He pulls a hand away from the table, reaches up to run it through his hair. His gaze is looking pointedly not at Karen’s.

“The – the fucking _kids._ I could – we all could – hear them at night. Begging and screaming.” He gives a bark of laughter. “Ya know, I’d been prepared to fight the Taliban and shit. I’d been to Iraq, I knew how this game was played but to sometimes hear those kids at night and not be able to do shit about it?” He shakes his head, though his bloodshot eyes grudgingly float back to hers.

“We had – our old commander – he fucking hated that shit as much as we did and did what he could to, to mitigate its proliferation around the FOB we were stationed at first deployment, but we got this FNG, fucking new captain before our second deployment, and he…” Scofield angrily swipes at his eyes, looks away again. “He didn’t say a word. Even when we followed the chain of command like we should’ve. Even when we tried to play nice, when we’d have discussions with ANP guys about, ‘hey, represent your country right and don’t rape kids.’ This – this fucking captain – he didn’t fight for us. Or those kids.”

Karen swallows, pushes down the writhing, awful creature that clamors in her stomach. “Was this a common occurrence?”

He shook his head violently. “Not everywhere. Not at every FOB. But we had a really shitty group of bad apples in the ANP with us.” He is quiet for a moment. “I wasn’t the only one that thought they might have been plied with boys and shit to be shitty to us, or incompetent. I don’t know how they smuggled these kids in – or _when_ – but midway through our second deployment I just – I just _snapped_."

“Why?"

Scofield pauses, considering. Clears his throat. “Our ‘terp was a good kid, seventeen, maybe eighteen years old. Sweet kid, brave as could be. Um…” he goes still for a few seconds, wets his lips. “We went to this meeting, with these big-wig tribal guys, and a few of them had started trying to take pictures with their fucking cell phones of him.”

Karen tilts her head to the side, and as Scofield’s gaze flickers from the distance to her, he elaborates. “Kid was a prime age for – ” he coughs, “for boy fuckery, ya know? A little effeminate, a little pretty. Big commanders sometimes have more prestige if they have a boy on their arm – some shit like that. It could have been blackmail, maybe, to have photos of our ‘terp, but we knew better, and so a few of us started telling those fuckers to delete the images, stop taking pictures, or the deal we were there for was off.”

“Did they?”

Scofield’s lips twist, ugly and bitter. “Yeah, yeah they did, but suddenly they called off the meeting and high-tailed it out of there. I thought it was weird. We had a few new lieutenants with us who picked up on the sketchy vibes as well. But this captain?” he locks eyes with her and shakes his head slowly.

“Nah,” he says. Voice soft. “Nah, it’s fine. We’ll be on guard for their shenanigans. Just be – ” and his voice drips with contempt, “on normal, high fuckin’ alert.”

Karen decides, then, that maybe she does need her notepad out, right some of these details down, pinpoint recurring themes. “Do you – ” she says quietly, “Do you mind if I write down some stuff? Not our actual, total conversation, but –”

He shrugs, shoulders abruptly slumping. “You are already recording this, yes?”

“As we agreed before the interview, yeah.”

Another shrug. “Then fine. S’not like it’s going to do much anyway.” He watches her hands as she reaches into her purse, pulling out the tiny, raggedy notebook with corners all tented in and the cover nearly shredded. Smirks. “Ya know, they have iPads and shit that you could use, instead.”

Karen looks up from her writing, and smiles wryly. “Yeah, but those are well-outside my price range.”

“I picked this McDonalds with your price-limitations in mind.”

She laughs, surprised, and across the table, Scofield visibly relaxes. Reaches for his fries again, then grimaces as he takes a bite. Probably cold, Karen thinks. She waits a few minutes as he appears to bravely muscle his way through a few more, then starts.

“Matt – ” she says, and he looks up. “What was this captain’s name?”

The fries still in his left hand, and he gently puts them back down on the plastic wrapper, which crinkles loudly.

“Where are you going with my story, ma’am?” He asks this quietly.

She’d told Scofield the general gist of it – how she’d tracked down his story through a tentative lead out of Pennsylvania, who’d told her about the death of a 1st lieutenant and the maiming of another in an IED attack in his unit when they’d been at the FOB. How the only real suspects in a case _within_ base perimeter could have been ANP, but how family back home received the information as an IED attack that occurred _outside_ base, on patrol. The Pennsylvania lead was hesitant to name too many names, give too many details, but told her that Scofield was one of the few who’d been adamant about the facts, and had loudly disputed them until his dishonorable discharge, in 2013.

"You're one of the few that will talk," she says. “And this is – this is something that wasn’t just a ‘one-time’ case with one or two bad eggs.”

He cocks his head to the side, regards her carefully. “What do you mean?”

Karen puts both of her hands of the table and looks down at them while she tries to find the words. “There’s a pattern, here.” She says after a long pause, bringing her eyes to his. “There’s a pattern of deaths in a certain region of Afghanistan that have very little accountability or information behind them.”

“And this matters to me because?”

“Because of the ten plus people I have interviewed about their time in Afghanistan, you are one of the few who was loud about wrongdoing.”

Scofield looks away from her towards the floor.

“It didn’t do me much good, talking,” he says. “Not then and not now.”

Karen feels her lips twist. “But –”

His gaze snaps to her, livid, and he leans forward. 

“No, you listen. This shit – this being honest, this telling investigators _why_ I did what I did and how I was justified?” he snorts. “It didn’t fucking matter. I lost _everything_. I was stripped of the rank I worked years to get to, lost the opportunity to finally go to _college_ \-- which was something that my family had never fucking done – my friends started avoiding me and my marriage collapsed.” Scofield taps the table for emphasis. “I lost _everything_.”

Karen readjusts herself in her seat, silent.

“What did you do?” she asks.

Scofield gives a huff of disbelief and leans back in his chair, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans

“Seriously?” his voice is incredulous. “Like, what you just got --” and he quickly pulls a hand out of the pocket to briefly motion at the notepad, the recorder, Karen’s outfit, with anger, “isn’t enough?” He opens his mouth to continue talking and Karen cuts him off.

“No, no this isn’t enough.” She says, feeling irritation heat up the back of her neck, behind the growing onset of a headache likely induced by caffeine. When she continues, her voice shakes, but she is comforted that it is now with anger, not horror from what she heard earlier.

“You know, you ask _me_ ,” and she prods a finger into her chest before pointing back at him, “to meet _you_ nearly out of the goddamn state at a stupid McDonalds and I do so. You ask _me_ to be as discreet as possible and low-key in getting out here and I do. You ask _me_ to listen to your story and now I am, and I am asking questions and looking at people and places and now you want me to fuck off?” Karen snorts. “No. I am here, and you are here, and if people haven’t listened in the past, I am sorry, but I am here now, and I want to _know._ So _tell me_.”

Scofield narrows his eyes at her, considering. She meets his gaze unflinching and angry, and after a pause he relents.

“I killed him,” he says, eyes again slipping off to a point behind her, to the table, anywhere but making eye contact.

“Killed who?”

“I killed one of the ANP guys.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew he was the one that grabbed our ‘terp. I knew because the kid would tell me the guy gave him the creeps, and I knew because this guy was a fucking ring leader amongst those idiots. I knew because he had a shit-eating grin on his face the day after our kid went missing, and that grin didn’t fucking go away when we found his body six days later, fucking acid burns all over and fucking – ” he breaks off abruptly and swipes angrily at his eyes, before he continues, gaze suddenly steady on Karen.

“So I killed that guy.” He says, matter-of-fact. “I beat the shit out of him and then I shot him.”

Karen keeps her face composed, even as she can feel a tremor beginning its path through her spine.

“And the IED? That killed two of the lieutenants in your company?”

Scofield swiftly deflates, shakes his head. “I don’t know ‘bout the IED,” he mutters. “Except that those two lieutenants – despite one being a fucking butterbar – were the only guys who seemed to give a shit when things went sideways. The ones who pushed hardest for us to do a search for this ‘terp, and were just as convinced as the rest of us that he’d been kidnapped.”

“Your captain?”

Scofield grunts. “What do you think?”

In the silence that follows, he suddenly stands, grabbing napkins scattered around the table and crumpling them up.

Startled, Karen looks up at him.

“I’m done,” Scofield says, hands moving restlessly across the table and identifying everything as trash that he throws onto his tray.

“I’m done with this interview, and I’m done with talking,” he continues. “The captain’s name is Daniel Ellison, and he is a piece of shit.” Scofield reaches across to her side of the table and plucks her untouched soda cup up, forcefully slamming it on the tray.

“Have a good day, _ma’am,_ ” he says, before he turns and strides stiffly away.

 

 

After that, Karen drives her car away from the McDonalds and over to a nearby park, trying to find a spot just under some shade. Turns off the car with a violent jerk of the key, and manually rolls down her window.

She sits quietly for a long time, and tries to avoid looking at the playground not even thirty feet away, crawling with screaming, laughing kids.

It isn’t until halfway back to the city that she notices her phone has been buzzing. She rummages through her purse, finally grabs the thing and brings it up by steering wheel. Frowns.

Two missed calls from a number she’s never seen before.

And a text: **Should talk soon.**

She puts the phone down gently onto the seat next to her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **First, nice things**  
>  Thank you to all of you for reading, kudo-ing and commenting! It's been a long time since I've tried writing anything fun (engineering is not a field where writing is encouraged, so...), but the fact people were reading and enjoying this has really pushed me to be consistent and continue this...weird creature. 
> 
> So thanks a lot! It warms the tiny, sad, cockles of my heart. 
> 
> **Second, onto jargon**  
>  **IED:** Improvised explosive device. These are homemade bombs, often buried on roadsides, that are triggered by pressure, trip wire, or remotely. They grew to be a heavily used device of insurgency forces in Iraq and Afghanistan due to their easiness to make, the fact they fuck people up terribly, and also that they could help insurgency avoid actually facing coalition forces in a firefight. Over [30,000 troops have been wounded by IEDs during the OIF and OEF campaigns](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/18/ied-10-years-blast-wounds-amputations/3803017/), which is terrifying...more than that, civilians also bear a great burden of the deaths and injuries from these devices.  
>  **'terp:** Slang for "interpreter." These brave men and women put their lives and the lives of their families on the line to help bridge the giant communication gap between people who aren't from Afghanistan/Iraq and those who are. [The United States has not been great at paying back these courageous peeps who risk everything to make translation possible between civilians and soldiers](http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2016/03/left-america-afghan-translators-160329132304215.html). On the ground, however, these folks tend to be well-respected by the troops they support.  
>  **FNG:** The fuckin' new guy. Either a highly incompetent boob or a dangerous, cocky asshole who has the potential to be _dangeorusly_ incompetent. Take your pic.  
>  **Butterbar:** Slang -- often derogatory -- for newly minted 2nd lieutenants (LT) in the military. In terms of the pecking order of officers, 2LT are at the bottom of the list: they're fresh out of college, and appear to have a tendency to be woefully naive or annoyingly motivated about life when compared to the combat-hardened, jaded enlisted ranks that they are charged with leading. In terms of rank, from lowest to what we care for in this story, you have: 2nd LT, 1st LT, and then a captain.  
>  **FOB:** Forward Operating Base. As per Wikipedia _: Any secured forward military position, commonly a military base, that is used to support tactical operations. A FOB may or may not contain an airfield, hospital, or other facilities._ Some FOBs are pretty nice and civilized, and others are just a hop-skip away from being a COP, or combat observation post. COPs tend to be...pretty rough. LIke a step above the worst, most miserable camping of your life but you may have the luck/privileged to get shot at from time to time. Some are within city limits, others are out in the boonies. There is no such place as "FOB Romero." I made it up. 
> 
> **Lastly, and most uncomfortably:**
> 
> What I detailed above has heavy roots in reality. In 2011, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, a Green Beret, beat the shit out of an ANP commander he had good reason to believe had kidnapped a boy, then chained to a bed to use as a sex slave. The Army had decided to make an example out of Martland and dishonorably discharge him, but after loud outcry retracted. [Soldiers have been told in Afghanistan to ignore many varied instances of child sex trafficking and rape due to 'cultural concerns.' ](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article) :( 
> 
> Unfortunately, the ANP does not have a good reputation amongst the troops there to help train them and the civilians they are supposed to protect. I have no doubt in my mind that there are probably some awesome, badass dudes in those ranks who want to do good and help their communities, but for other cases the ANP has become notorious for corruption, staggering incompetency and green-on-blue violence. I'll put links later -- running out of space here, but want to back up these claims if you guys desire further reading. 
> 
> **Otherwise**  
>  Thank you again for your continued reading and support. I'm trying to get a chapter out a week but when school starts back up (sooooon), I do believe this will be a pipe dream. 
> 
> _Please_ let me know if you spot grammatical errors, or historical/realistic inaccuracies (within reason, because this is fiction, etc), or anything else.


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